Mechanical Failure.

Joe Zieja.

To my wife, for whom my military life wasn't always this funny. Thanks for sticking with me.

a.s.ses to Ashes.

"I don't like the looks of this, Rogers," Dorsey said in a sort of depressed whine. "There are pirates here."

"Of course there are pirates here," Rogers said, looking out the window at the formation of ships floating in front of them. "I invited them. I invited two groups of pirates here. How the h.e.l.l else do you expect us to make money off this transfer?"

Dorsey looked at him, mostly expressionless except for the heavy-lidded stare that he seemed to have been practicing all his life. He punched a couple of the instruments on the panel and sighed.

"I don't like pirates," Dorsey said.

Dealing with intergalactic s.p.a.ce pirates was difficult enough; dealing with intergalactic s.p.a.ce pirates with the most cowardly copilot Rogers had ever hired was a whole new level of a.s.s pain.

"They don't really advertise themselves as likeable people," Rogers said. "And I didn't hire you to like them. I hired you to help me make a lot of good money off a lot of bad people. So just keep the controls steady while I work my magic."

A beep on the panel told him that he had an incoming transmission, and Rogers keyed it in. A gruff, inarticulate voice crackled over one of his several independent communication systems-Rogers had it configured so he could hear everything at once but had to switch channels to transmit. He didn't want either of the two groups to hear what he was saying to the other.

"You sure this is the right place?" asked a member of the Purveyors of Vitriol, one of the pirate groups.

"Of course I'm sure it's the right place," Rogers said with a practiced scoff of indignation.

He wasn't sure it was the right place. The military had trained him in navigation a bit, of course, but he was an engineer, not a pilot.

The Fortuna Stultus galaxy had been humanity's home for a thousand years or so-since they'd accidentally collapsed the Milky Way-but that didn't mean he knew it like the back of his hand. If he was reading the charts correctly on his holosphere, this should have been a desolate little location on the edge of Meridan territory, just outside of an Un-s.p.a.ce drop point that n.o.body ever used because it led to absolutely nowhere. And if there was one place that Rogers preferred to do hard work-like brokering a deal between two of the system's most devious pirate groups-it was absolutely nowhere.

"Just give them time," Rogers said, though he wasn't sure if he was rea.s.suring the Purveyors or rea.s.suring himself. "They need these supplies. The Garliali will be here."

A terse grunt was the only reply, which didn't surprise him at all. The Purveyors of Vitriol weren't known for their eloquence; they were a pirate organization, after all. They were decent chaps once you got to know them, and Rogers knew them well enough. He'd been pretending to be a spy for them for months.

The Garliali Mercenaries for whom they had been waiting, on the other hand, were not fine chaps. Some of them had been trained by the military, but most of them were just common thugs and cutthroats looking for a quick buck, and were pretty indiscriminate when it came to picking targets. Rogers would know; he'd been pretending to be a spy for them for months too.

"The Garliali?" Dorsey asked, his lilting voice cracking with nervousness. "You invited the Garliali Mercenaries here?" His face might have been flat, but his body looked like it wanted to jump out of his seat.

"Were you not even listening when I briefed you on this mission?"

"The Garliali are the biggest pirates in the system! They've knocked over armed Meridan patrol units."

"Yes," Rogers said, "and they're dangerously low on medical supplies precisely because they keep knocking over Meridan patrol units."

"How do you know they're low on supplies?"

"Because I stole them. Then I gave them to the Purveyors to sell back to the Garliali so that we can get a kickback."

Dorsey moaned like a cat that couldn't find its litter box. Rogers wanted to throttle him. Of all the pilots in the Meridan system, he had to hire Dorsey. Rogers wished more than one person had responded to the Help Wanted ad.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Dorsey asked.

"I spent ten years in the Meridan Patrol Fleet," Rogers said. "If you can't learn how to con someone in ten years in the MPF, you can't learn anything."

Dorsey looked askance at him again, then sighed and went back to the controls.

"I don't like pirates," he said.

The s.p.a.ce around them remained empty for another long few moments, and Rogers had the uncomfortable feeling that he might have made a miscalculation somewhere in his plan. He leaned back in his chair and swallowed the discomfort. He just needed to relax, wait, and resist the urge to lean forward and send a call to his contact in the Garliali Mercenaries.

Rogers leaned forward and sent a call to his contact in the Garliali Mercenaries.

"What's taking you so long?" he cried.

As if on cue, a thin blue line emerged in the backdrop of black s.p.a.ce, out of which spewed a handful of Garliali ships. Unlike the Purveyors, they took a bit more pride in the way their ships looked; their shimmering chrome surfaces shone brilliantly in the reflections of the Meridan solar star. The Purveyors, on the other hand, looked like they had a.s.sembled their ships from s.p.a.ce refuse dump points. Rogers knew better than to judge either of them by their looks. Once those plasma cannons started firing, n.o.body was really concerned what they looked like.

"Sorry we're late," a thin, feminine voice came over the comms. "A little trouble with the authorities," she said. "But a.s.ses to ashes, and all that."

"I'm pretty sure it's 'ashes to ashes,'" Rogers replied.

"Go back to the place we jumped from," the Garliali woman said-Rogers didn't recognize her voice-"and you tell me if you can find any a.s.ses left."

"You see? You see?" Dorsey said, shaking his head. "They're going to take our a.s.ses! We're not going to have a.s.ses!"

"Shut up, Dorsey. If you can't keep your cool, I'm going to eject you. I need you to trust me, alright? We'll get through this."

"I don't-"

"Like pirates, I know. I don't like them either. But sometimes you have to work with people you don't like so that you can make a ridiculous amount of money."

Rogers swallowed. Would they really make it through this alright? Maybe he should have stuck to running gambling rings and moving contraband between new recruits.

Looking out his c.o.c.kpit window and through the many video cameras mounted on the hull of his ship, Rogers could see the two opposing squadrons moving into battle positions. At least, they certainly looked like battle positions; he was pretty sure pirates didn't have a wide variety of formations. But they weren't going to fight each other-not if Rogers could help it, anyway-but that didn't mean that a lot of shiny silver cannon barrels weren't pointed at a lot of other shiny silver cannon barrels. He'd hate to be in the middle of them.

Unfortunately, he was directly in the middle of them.

"If they try anything," the Purveyor said over the radio, "we're gonna see us some fried Garliali."

"Fried calamari?" someone else on the Purveyor channel said.

"No, I said fried Garliali."

"They won't try anything," Rogers said.

"They won't try anything with what?" the Garliali woman asked. "Who's trying anything?"

Rogers swore and switched the comm system back to the Purveyors' channel.

"They won't try anything," Rogers said again.

"Why not? Fried calamari is good. You won't know if you like it until you try it."

"We ain't fryin' no calamari!" the Purveyor leader roared. "Get the wax out of your ears and get off the radio or I'm gonna come down from the bridge and rip-" The comms cut off.

Rogers shook his head and sighed. "Pirates . . ."

He looked over at Dorsey, who was still shaking his head and mumbling as he did his control checks. Could he really trust him if this got heated? Rogers didn't need someone that was going to freak out at the first sign of trouble. He needed someone that could help them bug out if people started shooting. Rogers thought it would be a good idea to calm him down a bit.

"Dorsey," Rogers said, sighing. "Don't worry about anything. This is going to be simple, just like I told you. I know this is your first mission with me, but I'm going to take care of you. All we have to do is be the intermediary for the cargo and the cash. The Garliali are going to start sending us the credits, and then the Purveyors will let us release the cargo. They'll pick it up, and we'll go home. Does that sound so hard?"

Well, it was a little harder than that. Rogers wasn't just planning on getting a kickback; he was going to steal the credits, too. He left that part out. He didn't want to spook Dorsey any further. That and he'd gave to give Dorsey a bigger cut if he was honest about the amount. Honesty didn't pay.

Rogers also left out the part about the Garliali getting giant packets of baking flour instead of medical supplies. The . . . unlucky family he'd met at the transportation terminal on Merida's second moon had convinced him that maybe pirates didn't deserve to get patched up properly. That and the hospital there had been willing to buy them. At a discount, of course.

Dorsey looked at him, clearly dubious. "I guess it doesn't sound that bad."

"It'll be easy. Like, uh, what did you used to do before I hired you yesterday?"

"Postal work."

"It'll be like postal work. Just delivering packages. See? You're already an expert. n.o.body is going to shoot us."

After a moment of looking at Rogers with open distrust, Dorsey visibly relaxed. He was still shaking his head, but at least he wasn't muttering about not liking pirates anymore.

"Great," Rogers said. "Now, you're in charge of maneuvers while I manage the communications and the cargo. Just like we talked about. Okay?"

"Okay."

Rogers took a deep breath and wiped his hand across his forehead. It was now or never, he supposed.

"Alright," he said to the Garliali over the radio, making sure to switch the comms channel this time. "Get your cargo ship in position and start the transfer."

"Way ahead of you."

A small tugboat-like ship had already separated from the Garliali group and was heading toward the Awesome-Rogers' ship-its heavy-lifting engines emitting an eerie blue glow. It looked like a giant beetle, with two mandibles below its flat c.o.c.kpit. The Garliali fighters maintained a tight wedge formation, the tip of which pointed right across Rogers' bow and toward the Purveyors, whose formation was more like s.p.a.ce popcorn.

"Credits first!" the Purveyor leader belched over the radio.

"Relax," Rogers said. "I'll let them know not to get too ahead of themselves."

Reaching forward, he keyed in the frequency for the Garliali representative.

"Listen up," he said. "You can route the funds through the computer on my ship. I'll remove any traces from the credits so they can't be, uh, traced, and then I'll route them to the Purveyors. When it's halfway done, you can start picking up the cargo. Got it?"

"Got it, Rogers," the female said. "You're a good man."

Rogers had been called a lot of things in his life, but a "good man" wasn't one of them. If the two groups he was tricking were anything but notorious criminal organizations, he might have felt a little bit bad about it. Mostly, though, he was one careless sneeze away from peeing in his pants in fear.

His digital interface changed as he was notified that the credits were incoming. With a couple swift b.u.t.ton presses and an authentication code, the money started flowing.

"That's kind of strange," Dorsey said. "Why are they sending us the money?" He made some trim adjustments on the control panel and checked his instruments, fiddling with b.u.t.tons. Some of the nervousness had already come back-Rogers could see him sitting more stiffly.

"It's complicated," Rogers said. "Lots of, um, really technical finance stuff about money laundering and all that. Just pilot the d.a.m.n ship and make sure we don't run into the cargo after we release it, alright?"

The "technical finance stuff" was a spoofing program that would funnel all the credits into Rogers' account. The Purveyors would be receiving empty data packets, but if the finance tech he'd known from his military days had programmed this correctly, they wouldn't know about it until he was relaxing on a beach on Dathum under an a.s.sumed name.

A quiet moment pa.s.sed as the sequence started working. Rogers saw a lot of code running from his command console-he even understood most of it-and his heart felt like it was trying to climb up his throat and out his nose. Just one over-observant Purveyor, and people would start shooting.

"There's the credits," the Purveyors squawked over the radio. "You're a good man, Rogers."

A good man, twice in one day? Something about that made his skin crawl a bit.

Rogers smirked to himself as the transfer reached fifty percent completion. Now all he had to do was unlock the cargo magnets to release the crate, sit back, and collect the best kind of money there was-someone else's. He flipped the switch to disengage the cargo and watched the open, empty s.p.a.ce through the window.

"Beautiful," Rogers said. "Just beautiful. See? I told you this would be easy."

The tugboat's mandibles cinched around the crate and began its flight back to the Garliali escort, and Rogers reached for a bottle of Jasker 120, the finest Scotch in the system. Now was a time for celebration.

A beep came from his instrument panel, which he promptly ignored just like he did most beeps that came from his instrument panel. This was not a time for beeps.

"What's that?" Dorsey asked.

"It's nothing. Ignore it. Never believe computers. Just keep your eyes on the controls and keep us steady. We're going to jump back out of the same point we jumped in from as soon as we're done."

The beep sounded again.

"Rogers," Dorsey said. "There's a ship coming in."

"That's ridiculous," Rogers said. "We're in the middle of nowhere. The Meridan Patrol Fleet doesn't even bother scanning this sector-that's why I picked it. It's probably just a late pirate cruiser or something."

Just to prove him wrong, a void opened in Un-s.p.a.ce and disgorged a bright silver ship bearing the markings of the Meridan Patrol Fleet.

"You've got to be kidding me," Rogers said.

"It's the MPF!" Dorsey yelled. "I don't like them, either!"

"What the h.e.l.l?" the Purveyor yelled over the radio.

"It's a setup!" the Garliali shouted.

"Cancel the calamari and get to the guns!"

"Wait!" Rogers said, but it was too late. And he wasn't sure what channel he was talking on, anyway.

Everyone from both sides started to talk into their radios at once, creating such a cacophony of panic that Rogers felt like he should be shooting something. But shooting something would immediately reveal to whatever side he shot that he was not their ally. Running away would do the same thing for both sides. So, Rogers did what he did every time he was in a battle: nothing.